Bo102010

After reading Ridiculous Fish's version of this (http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/The-app-that-was-fixed-...), I use a mental version of Dr. House.

It's worked out a couple of times... "How can the process have failed when the logs indicate success?" "Everybody lies." "Oh, so maybe the log is written at some point before the process actually finishes?" "Treat with steroids."

I don't know whether one should move one's company to STL, but it is neither culturally nor socially barren. I moved to town in 2009 and my experience is quite different from palish's.

Glad to help inform!

It's generally accurate to say that basic cable isn't _switched_ digital, which isn't the same as saying it's analog.

It's not accurate to say that basic cable is analog - that is, a single channel can fit into a 6 MHz space. Some providers may put their whole basic lineup in analog, but this is decidedly not a technical requirement.

There's a difference between the little Comcast DTA (for receiving clear QAM digital signals that aren't switched) and a tuning adapter (for receiving digital signals that are switched).

For my company, some markets have no analog channels at all - basic cable services are delivered as clear QAM, and customers use a QAM TV, a DTA, or set-top box to receive them.

Other markets have some analog channels and some digital channels as part of basic cable - if you have an analog TV, you can only see the analog ones, unless you have a DTA.

FWIW, basic cable isn't analog (well, some channels can be delivered in analog), so your points based on that line of thinking don't follow. It's typically not switched-digital because the basic services (such as the major broadcasters) are heavily watched, so there's not much benefit to going to switched-digital.

Your edit isn't quite correct - if 100 people in the same building (service group) are watching the same TV channel, there's no bandwidth savings if they're all getting an individual stream. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_digital_video) for an example of a hybrid approach.

Also, there are already technologies that know what TVs are displaying.

They do eventually pay for themselves ($13 per month! Geez.), but they (a) cost more than you might think to begin with, (b) require a lengthy setup and provisioning process that is quite labor intensive, (c) lock you in to old technology - you can't move to, say, MPEG-4 or IP delivery if you've got a million legacy boxes to deal with.

Similar to how phone companies wish they wouldn't have to subsidize new phones, there are lots of people in the cable industry who wish that every TV had a CableCARD slot and IP connectivity (for PPV/VOD services), or that there was a peripheral you could plug into an Xbox or something that would let you get/decrypt cableco signal.

Obviously opinions will differ from company to company, and we are all actually evil.

Yeah - the idea is that the cablecos could avoid sending a truck to activate or remove services.

But this isn't mentioned in the article, and the article is actively wrong in the ways I mentioned above, plus others (e.g. "There is no reason to change this policy now just because the cable companies want every home and apartment to have one of their set-top boxes..." No they don't. They want people who don't want more than basic packages to have a settop at all, and avoid that up-front investment).

I work in the industry, and this article is quite... misinforming.

For one, the sentence "Getting rid of QAM isn't a bad idea in the long run" is crazy. QAM is a general-purpose modulation technique used in numerous technologies. It has nothing to do with the evil cablecos trying to lock down their signal, or something.

Next, the sentence "the cable industry is currently lobbying the FCC for a rulemaking that would allow them to encrypt QAM" is hopelessly misinformed.

If you plug a QAM tuner into a cable subscriber's coaxial outlet, you'll be receiving data for a few hundred cable channels, but all but a dozen or two are _already encrypted_. The ones that aren't encrypted are you local ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, etc. The ones that are encrypted are "expanded basic" services.

Why are these encrypted? In part to prevent signal piracy to protect revenues, but also in part because the content providers require it. If you're a cableco, you can't offer ESPN or HBO without encrypting the signal - ESPN and HBO won't let you.

I can't speak for my cableco employer, but I have never had a conversation in which someone said "I wish we could encrypt our clear QAM channels" - it's always been the opposite. It's much easier to offer service if you can get the signal to a customer without having to buy some crappy converter box or spend a lot of money on a high end settop.

I am an electrical engineer. I used this site as a reference all throughout my schooling. Yes, it's incomplete, but it's a great resource nonetheless.

Interesting - I had an original Pre, and could go weeks without having to reboot it. Contrast with my new Nexus S, which I find I need to give a kick every few days.

I did have few apps installed on my Pre compared to my Nexus, which is likely a factor.

I really like Google+ also, but without all my Facebook friends (I deactivated Facebook after they overwrote my privacy settings) it's not nearly as useful or fun.

I'm trying a new technique - rather than saying "Hey, join Google+! It's really cool!" to people; I'm saying "Ah, yes, Facebook... I used to be one of _those_ people."

Likewise. I side with the ACLU on Citizens United - i.e. that the Supreme Court decided it correctly.

You can rationally be displeased what you expect the outcome of the case to be (e.g. increased ability for corporate financing of election campaigns), but I don't think there's a coherent defense of the sections of BCRA that the court struck down.

ETA: The government argued that BCRA would allow them to ban, for example, a 500 page book that contained a single sentence endorsing a candidate (http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/will-elena-kagan-allow...). If you think SOPA is heavy-handed, just think what BCRA could have led to.

I used to work for Sprint. I never got that Dan Hesse had strong empathy for customers, but that he knew that good customer service was going to be good for investors in the medium run.

The guidance in engineering was always to make sure customer experience wasn't bad, but the framing wasn't "think of the poor consumer!" - instead it was "we absolutely must reduce churn or die."

I was glad he was CEO and still impressed that he's stuck with it.

I would guess that lots of FiOS customers also subscribe to Netflix (and maybe don't understand the FiOS streaming interface). So why not give in and try to capture that?

The graphic brought up these same kind of questions for me. If you're a band with a new album out, how much from that album should you play? Would you rather boost demand for it, or keep long-time fans happy so they come back to the show next year?

The answer may vary by band. My favorite band, Reel Big Fish, recently did a tour with lots of "deep cuts" and few A-side hits. I loved it, and I think lots of long-time fans did too. But was it economically optimal?

Firefox isn't doomed. Not only is it still a good web browser that many (myself included) continue to use daily, inertia will keep it installed on millions of PCs.

As far as I know, Mozilla and Google maintain good relations. Even if the deal that provides money from Google to Mozilla isn't renewed, I doubt they will entirely disentangle themselves from each other.

I don't doubt that the skills that make a good system admin are distinct from those that make a good engineer.

I do doubt that the people making and enforcing IT policies that, e.g. lead to insecure versions of Java being installed on thousands of machines, are more capable than I am at managing the machine I need to use.

A lot of my problems with IT departments would be solved if the IT folks recognized that people with degrees in computer engineering and computer science tend to be able to take care of their own machines.

Also, if they would quit telling me that I can't run VLC because it's not secure, when they have 3 year old versions of the Java Runtime Environment installed on everyone's PC.

In my experience, having an e-mail hit your inbox doesn't necessarily mean that you're the most important recipient.

At work I may be on the CC list for a number of ongoing e-mail threads - usually they don't require any input from me, but I might have to read through them to determine whether this is the case.

These types of e-mails will fill up your inbox, but don't quite sink to the level of "useless dreck," but sometimes you can legitimately say that your time is currently too important to spend sifting through lots of e-mail.

In 2005, Reason magazine had an excellent discussion with Milton Friedman, John Mackey (Whole Foods), and T.J. Rodgers (Cypress Semiconductors) that is relevant to this discussion (http://reason.com/archives/2005/10/01/rethinking-the-social-...).

othermaciej likely read Megan McArdle's article at (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2011/10/if-you-fav...). It's a good article.

Although RyanMcGreal didn't refer specifically to Glass-Steagall, it's a good bet that "re-regulating" (i.e. re-introducing measures from that law) might be a bad idea in several cases, Regulation Q being one of them.

I'm not a big fan of Unity, but I'm sympathetic to Shuttleworth in this matter.

After following open source projects for some years, it seems they're all eventually accused of some dark corruption - usually after making some UI change.

"You're betraying the ideals of the [project / community / founder]," the accusers say. "It used to be about giving users [freedom / choice / slightly less RAM usage]. Now it's just about [main leader of project / 'the developers' / the corporations]'s whims! Why not just give us [a setting / the old behavior / a large-scale feature]!"

Take a look at Firefox forums after every release, or Pidgin's bug tracker every time they tweak the GUI...

It reminds me of an older Less Wrong article - (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uu/why_does_power_corrupt/).

Now, it could be that all projects are slowly decaying into [ego / corporate / dictatorial designer]-centric tarpits, but I kind of doubt it.

My sister complained to me about the "hanging" Firefox problem, and disabling stupid extensions fixed it right up. Firefox really needs to have a profile-cleaning mechanism.

These problems people report must be very system-dependent. I've been running Firefox on my 2GB RAM Dell laptop I bought in 2007 for $600 without any issues.

I'm saying the engineers may know it, but their bosses _do not_.

"That said, any major ISP who claims it costs them more than a few pennies per gigabyte to move traffic is flat out lying"

Not lying, but confused (see my comment below) and measuring at the wrong margin.

Cost per GB isn't really even what you want to measure, and doing so is what causes so much confusion.

Let's say you're an ISP and you have a 10Gbps connection to the outside world, and the routers etc. that can keep up with that speed.

To a first approximation, your costs to serve up 10Gbps to all the customers in your area is 0 (you've got to pay for electricity and engineers and etc, but this doesn't vary with user activity).

If your customers in your area all queued up nicely and downloaded stuff at full rate, never overlapping with each other, you could transfer 10Gbps * 1 month for basically nothing.

However, your customers all want to do stuff at the same time, and thus contend with each other for a slice of that 10Gbps. If you want to serve all of their requests, you're going to have to spring to upgrade your total capacity.

If you don't own your own fiber, you have to rent a link from someone else, or if you do and there's no more available you have to physically come up with more (and pay to dig up the road and etc.). Now your routers and etc. might not be able to keep up with your new backhaul speed, and you have to upgrade those...

You really want to measure "Marginal cost of +x Kbps during the busiest typical hour."

Probably quite a while. Phone companies have done and continue to do this, but are moving more and more away from it.

I'd be thrilled if someone tried it, though. It's more honest and more likely to address bad user experiences than arbitrary "bytes transferred per month caps."

I have worked for ISPs where people who are making decisions about "bandwidth" _do not understand_ the difference between "bits" and "bits per second."

These decision-makers would say that "Our costs for providing backhaul / transport / whatever is going up - no matter how much we upgrade, its capacity is exhausted either immediately or very quickly. We have to recover that cost somehow, or we won't be able to continue providing any service."

However, they don't understand that their equipment and transport are constrained at the level of "bits per second at peak" and not "sum of bytes transferred during a billing period." So, they end up making bad decisions about "charging $x per GB after y GB transferred per month."

His github account is gone as well (http://github.com/diveintomark).

This is troubling. I'm glad I downloaded Dive Into Python 3, at least.